GT-BDI Model: A Combined Game-Theoretic and BDI-Based Computational Model for Emergency Evacuation With Search and Rescue Robots

The catastrophic impact of disasters on affected populations necessitates effective management practices to minimize the societal and economical damages caused by disasters. This pertains planning effective measures to find and rescue trapped victims in time. Search and rescue in general is very challenging, as the number of the trapped victims may be unknown and their behaviour while trying to evacuate the disaster area is prone to variations, depending on their individual cognition and social interactions. Evacuation robots have attracted attention for their role in assisting search and rescue teams to locate and save victims. A behavioural model of the victims can provide insights for both the staff and the robots in search and rescue missions on how the trapped victims act during an evacuation, and to plan the search and rescue mission accordingly. Such a model, after being validated, can also be used for analysis of the influence of the robots in search and rescue missions. This paper proposes a novel evacuation model that integrates game theory and the belief-desire-intention (BDI) framework, in order to incorporate both the interactions of the trapped victims and their cognitive processes at the individual level. The model is validated using existing benchmark models for evacuation behaviour. Furthermore, the validated model is used to assess the effectiveness of the evacuation robots within the evacuation procedure. It is found that the presence of evacuation robots does reduce the evacuation time, as a function of the trust of the victims in these robots.